LO1 – My Inspiration

Week 1, 9/5/2020

The project I want to talk about this week is called “the substitute”, by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. The piece is a 2-minute video showing a fully rendered northern white rhino that steadily increases in quality and vividness, from a blocky mass to a full-formed animal, until the video suddenly cuts short. The rendering is not of any particular animal, but a composite made from footage of northern white rhino herds captured by Czech scientist Richard Policht.

Animation company The Mill created the animation and Dr. Andrea Banino from DeepMind, an AI development company, provided data for the rhino’s movement. The Cooper-Hewitt museum commissioned the project and provided the funding.

I really admire how the project attempts to present a stark contradiction to viewers. The last male northern white rhino died in 2018, rendering the breed virtually extinct despite a few surviving females. Despite this disaster, scientists are attempting to revive the species using banked genetic material that might be planted in surrogate mothers artificially. This project dares to ask if there’s any difference between this clearly ‘fake’ rhino and one that had been created in a lab. It also challenges our preconceptions around AI: why are we so eager to create new intelligence (i.e. AI) when we have been such bad shepherds of non-human intelligence on this earth? It asks whether this ‘fake’ rhino, rendered in a white box utterly devoid of context, is so different from the life we are making in our biotech labs or computer labs.

As far as I know, these companies used their own proprietary software for the project. The artist may have been inspired by other uses of AI that relate to art, such as AI that make songs (sweaty machines’ “Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears”, an AI-written eurovision entry, comes to mind), create sports (such as Speedgate), or write scripts (like comedy AI botnik). I hope that other artists see this project and are inspired to create new things that utilize AI to ask important questions about life & the responsibilities we have as the caretakers of our environment.

– Robert